Nintendo has unveiled a new set of Joy-Con bundles in time for the summer season.
The theme for 2023 summer Joy-Cons is pastel colors. Starting this June 30, 2023, you can buy a bundle with either of these combinations, at $ 79.99 per bundle:
Left Pastel Purple, Right Pastel Green – store link
Left Pastel Pink, Right Pastel Yellow – store link
And if you were curious, yes. The limited edition Animal Crossing themed Nintendo Switch had a Left Pastel Green Joy-Con alongside a Right Pastel Blue Joy-Con. If you happen to have that special edition, you can pair two matching Pastel Green Joy-Cons.
That makes Pastel Green and Bright Red the only Joy-Cons with matching colors. It does make one wonder why Nintendo won’t sell these Joy-Cons with matching left-right colors for all the colors.
On one end, we can understand the line of thinking. Each Joy-Con is usable as a different controller, especially for multiplayer. It is practical to provide different colors so that players can identify which controller they have when they are playing multiplayer games.
But aesthetically, some players are definitely not satisfied with the asymmetrical color scheme Nintendo has tried to normalize. Furthermore, there are definitely a lot of Nintendo Switch owners who play by themselves, and only play multiplayer online if they do.
The Famicom had controllers labeled Player 1 and Player 2, so why wouldn’t this kind of theming work on left and right sided Joy-Cons? Players probably can’t avoid picking up Joy-Cons with the same colors anyway if they have been collecting them.
Maybe some fans will cynically call this a ploy to make more money, but I don’t think it actively hurts anyone if Nintendo provided more choices in this regard.
On the side, the choice of pastel colors is certainly interesting. Nintendo has previously chosen bright or neon color schemes for their Joy-Cons.
These schemes do help make them easier to identify for multiplayer games. But they were probably also chosen to make them easier to find, perhaps under the sofa or in cover of darkness.
All things considered, Nintendo actually exercised some restraint with these color variations. You can certainly drive yourself a little crazy collecting each special Wii-Mote color variation.
If Nintendo wanted to, they could have gone crazy with selling new Joy-Cons for each new first party game they released, in the same way they did with amiibo.
But perhaps pandemic manufacturing limitations have something to do with their restraint. In any case, if these sell well, we may see more Joy-Con colors in the future, enough to fill out a crayon box.
